I can confirm that there already is a Mandatory Tutorial for all Members who just signed up. There is also a Message sent to New Members about how things run in the Developer Forum and where to go for what.
TL;DR - There is a Tutorial for people who just signed up and a message sent to New Members when they get promoted so you have nothing to be afraid of/worried about.
Thereās a lot of kids who donāt bother to read anything that seems too long for them, Iām a moderator for the Car Crushers 2 Official Discord and Iāve seen that some people donāt even bother reading the rules.
At the end of the dayās itās their own choice whether they read the rules or not. Itās not up to the systems on whether they read the rules or not. Itās on the person reading the rules.
If they donāt read the rules the staff donāt have as many places to watch too thanks to the New Member Permission. They can primarily focus on the Announcements Category, Inception Forum and Bullet-In Board which probably gain the most attention from users anyway, meaning they can easily flag it if it goes against the rules.
You are not really responding to any argument being made so far. You are responding to arguments that arenāt being made.
Some people who were granted access were barely proficient, and some users who were never accepted where very proficient.
You are still acknowledging there was a lower bound on skill. Yes, itās true that proeficient users were not accepted due to bad luck, but that doesnāt changes that lower bound. With this changes thereās effectively no lower bound anymore. Thatās why Iām arguing the quality is going to decline.
Developers who were proficient but were not getting in for extended periods of time if ever were effectively being punished by being barred from resources other, sometimes less proficient, developers had.
Yes, we can all agree the system had flaws, nobody is arguing that. What we are arguing is the new systemās approach to solving them, which in my opinion is not the correct one, as I explained above.
Yes, it has benifits such as limiting community size so it can be better managed. Limiting size is not a scalable solution, as it goes against the core idea of scalability
Nobody is arguing a small community is better than a big community, I recon we would all love a big community. What we are arguing is the size increase is not beneficial if the quality decreases, and the noise to signal ratio gets to big to manage, which, yes, usually is correlated to the size of the community but thatās not the point here.
A better solution would have been to just create a new rank called newcomer, maybe give them the same access as new members but limit their posting rate. It would also kept the differentiation of members that went through manual review and those that were accepted by the new system.
Your suggested solution does nothing to change the problems you are stating. Even at 1 post/day those new users would be posting ālower qualityā content. And why is there a need to differentiate people who went through manual review or not aside from an āeliteā status symbol.
Iām full well with you on saying that the current system might need tweaking (people have stated being able to get in after only a few hours and this I disagree with). An automated system that has a clear set of expectations (even if not giving the exact to prevent as much abuse) is a step in the right direction though.
I personally find that barring legitiment developers from important resources is far worse a problem than some lower quality content making it into the forum.
And how much of a slap in the face was it for developers who applied over years and years and never even heard back? Meanwhile they couldnāt participate in, again, huge benifits like having a forum to give their input?
In the end the benifits of the change far outweigh the consequences as I see it, and clearly as Roblox staff anticipate based off their decision to make the change.
Not going to reply to anyone in particular mainly because I donāt want to go searching for it again, but I noticed a discussion about the entry requirements. It was noted that it currently takes about 3 hours of viewing to be let in as a new member. Someone countered with a week of time. If you actually look at this, itās super unrealistic. I am on the forum reading random posts just about every single day and my total read time is only 4 days. Iāve been a full member since Feb. of 2018 and have near continuous daily activity. I think the three hour limit is good. Most posts only take a few minutes to read. It will take quite a few posts to reach that 3 hour mark.
According to my stats, my 4 days of read time equates to 27,000 posts read. Keep in mind, thatās 4 DAY! Like 24 hours x 4. Thatās 96 hours. Thatās a lot of time.
I have two days of read time. Iād still expect people to get three to five days of read time for auto rank.
Instead of speaking in days, why donāt we equate it to hours. You said 3-5 days of read time to be let in, thatās 72-120 hours of reading posts on the devforum.
Your 48 hours of read time is equating to 11,000 posts read and nearly 1,000 topics! These are quite large numbers.
Three hours seems like a lot, but even as an example this post could take about half an hour to scroll through. Provided someone read every reply on every announcement, that easily equates to these hours, even though thatās no indication of their interest or basic proficiency* because information gets posted here on the regular thatās relevant to non-developers as well (like the subletting of clans, for example). If it was possible with dealing with the abysmal thing that is Discourseās API, I would say it should require at least an hour of read time in other sections of the devforums as well just to ensure some measurement of interest. Though again this is Discourse so that may very well not be possible.
*Basic proficiency in this case meaning ācan follow rules and use the search featureā because checking those two boxes would immediately increase the quality of a lot of posts.
Read time is not a good way to determine who should be a new member. Itās easy to accidentally read a couple of announcement threads for three hours. I could even gain these hours over an entire month if I was particularly inactive (assuming the new process is using total read time). This is a very poor way to identify users who want to be here and would benefit from being here.
It should be based off some minimum amount of activity over a period of time. For example, 15-30 minutes of read time daily for a week, or some number of minutes over the span of a week. This is still a poor way to pick new members and is bottable, but itās still better as itās less likely to drag in riffraff who donāt have an inkling of respect for the forum, or those who donāt have the attention span to read and learn.
Will this new system change the way we get the Member role? Do we still have to apply after a few months, or did that also change?
This is only for Visitor --> New Member at the moment. We are looking at improving the New Member --> Member procedure next but not necessarily in the context of automation.
Got it. Thank you!
In my opinion, having a random live exam to validate their alleged skill could be a reasonable alternative.
Thatās a bad idea because it doesnāt scale and we have diverse skills on this forum.
We want to make sure this process is based off of maturity and professional posting behavior on the forum.
As someone who returned to ROBLOX development only a few weeks ago (havenāt used since 2016), this new system has actually really encouraged me in the development of my new game, because it gives me a feeling of accessibility and even community that makes the feeling of developing on the platform much more inviting.
Regarding post quality of new membersāpersonally, I feel much more encouraged to have a high post quality than regular forums, having now spent a while each day on the forum and seeing the quality of the forum as a resource which is useful to me, and so a quality I want to contribute to and help improve (if only in a small way). I think this will be true for many emerging developers.
I might be inclined to bias by only getting new member a few minutes ago, but Iām just grateful to be a part of this 
I really like this update. It gives people who are trying to become developers, like me, a place to learn more about build, scripting, and more.
The reason why it was changed and updated to utilization of the forum, is because of how many applicants applied in the first place, and it takes a very long time to get accepted (as you said) to get in. That is pretty much the main reason why they did this, so more people donāt have to wait longer times (like you did).